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  For Nabû, august, majestic and awesome heir, firstborn son of Asarre, foremost of all, who bears the tablet of destinies of the gods, whom the Igigi gods respect most in the entire universe, my lord, I, Šamaš-riḫtu-uṣur, son of Šamaš-iddina, the baker of Šamaš and Aya, with joy in my heart went out to the open countryside. I picked up some clean clay and brought it from the holy clay-deposit. I loaded(!) it on my shoulder and transported it. For my good health, for a long life, for well-being, f...

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  #Mexico had in fact abolished slavery in 1829[.] All of the leaders of Mexico, in itself only an independent country since 1821, were personally opposed to slavery, in part because of the influence of emissaries from the freed slave republic of Haiti. . . . The Mexican armies that entered the department [of the state of Coahuila y Tejas] to put down the rebellion had explicit orders to free any [enslaved people] that they encountered, and so they did. The only person spared in the retaking of t...

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  Me buying a discounted book here, splurging on a bulk sale there, all in the touching hope that someday I'll have time to read them all. #bookstodon #amReading #somedayISwear

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  The authors argue that archaeologists should separate two questions. First, why did people bury their money? Second, why did nobody return? The first answer often involves saving wealth or keeping valuables safe. The second points toward death, forced flight, lost memories, changing landscapes, or large wars. Together, those forgotten hoards preserve a record of people whose plans ended before they reached home. – Dario Radley, Why thousands of Roman coin hoards were never recovered, new study...

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  If your main source of traffic is Google search, you should consider blogs that cover experiences that cannot be AI-summarized. . . . The dividing line was irreplaceability: whether the reader needed that specific author to get the result. . . . The blog-as-a-business model, involving publishing, ranking, monetizing clicks, and repeating the cycle, is dead. Not dying but dead. The data on all 100 of its supposed best cases says so plainly. What replaced [it] is content nobody else can credibly...

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  Stone tools and obsidian artifacts provided some of the strongest clues. The evidence suggests people often traveled between 40 and 200 kilometers. . . . . . . Researchers believe these shared traditions point to the exchange of skills and ideas between groups. Knowledge moved across the region, helping people keep useful techniques and cultural practices alive. . . . The findings suggest that strong social networks were a key part of life for prehistoric hunter-gatherers. Long-distance conn...

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  @mhoye@cosocial.ca Seeeriously. I consider unaccountable superrich predators who run sex & snuff trafficking rings without fear to be a far greater threat to my child than (checks) web browsing.

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  “If you're asking ‘why a woman [for Prime Minister],’ I don't believe that's an appropriate question in the year 2026.” – Presidential Chief of Staff Kang Hoon-sik in answer to a question asking whether gender was a factor in selecting Minister of SMEs and Startups Han Seong-sook as the next Prime Minister. Han is on track to be the second female Prime Minister of the Republic of #Korea after Han Myeong-sook, who served in that position in 2006 and 2007.

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  #WritingPride Jun. 1 – Do you have any queer protagonists? Most of them are. Souri in A Very Long Malaise is a wlw, appropriately enough for a story appearing in Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast. https://alpennia.com/blog/lesbian-historic-motif-podcast-episode-301-very-long-malaise-lj-lee Between One Word and the Next, a spiritual prequel to Malaise, is upcoming this year and also features a wlw protagonist and antagonist. A Maiden's War, my retelling of the Ballad of #Mulan, interprets...

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  Beer from the Warring States period! https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2352409X26001732 “The results suggested that the liquid residue was likely a cereal-based alcoholic beverage with high concentrations of lactic acid and oxalic acid, and a low concentration of tartaric acid, as well as 23 other classes of organic compounds such as amino acids, fatty acids and carbohydrates. Microfossil results further confirmed the primary brewing ingredients were broomcorn millet and Tr...

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  It's local elections day and I'm just waiting for today to pass so I can move the hell on with my life lol I mean the indications aren't bad, it looks like it'll be a very high turnout for local elections which is generally thought to be a good sign for candidates who are not conspiracy theorists or fascists. It's just that we've had national elections every year since 2024 and two of them are coming after the failed coup attempt (the one last year...

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  In short, as LLMs proliferate they will ‘contaminate’ the training pool, and make it harder and harder to build future models. These challenges may not be insurmountable - one can imagine an army of human reviewers sifting out the “good” code from the bad, or an elaborate series of sandboxes and unit tests to try to improve automatic detection of bugs - but they will certainly prove difficult to overcome. – Milo Trujillo, Model Collapse https://backdrifting.net/post/082_model_collapse #AI #No...

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  #WritersCoffeeClub Jun. 1 – In what ways do your real-world surroundings appear in your work? I wrote a shaped poem, The Building Across The Way, representing the grid of windows I see when I look out my window at the building facing ours! https://thecarrierbag.org/issues/a-new-leaf/ (Page 1 of Issue 1 of The Carrier Bag) #poetry

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  The existence of material #history implies the existence of immaterial history 🧐

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  “There was amongst them a poor deformed woman, with legs and arms no longer than an infant’s,” he recorded in his diary. “She was well mounted, and the gallant manner in which some of the plumed Apaches waited on her, for she was perfectly helpless when dismounted, made it hard for me to believe the tales of blood and vice told of these people.” – A lieutenant in a U.S. topographical unit on a meeting with an #Apache delegation, from The Apache Wars by Paul Andrew Hutton #Indigenous #disabilit...

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  House sizes became more similar during later periods of the city’s history. . . . At the same time, #MohenjoDaro expanded and grew more prosperous. Archaeologists have long noted what the city lacks. Excavations uncovered no royal palaces, no giant statues of rulers, and no lavish tombs filled with gold or luxury goods. . . . Researchers believe city governance played a large role in limiting inequality. Investment focused on practical systems tied to daily life, including drainage, street mai...

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  First ever fully organic 100% on #HarvestGame! 🎉 Honestly I didn't know all the words in advance; I just cast around before I landed on some of them, and the final one was a previously unknown word that I got with basically a glorified keysmash only made possible because I knew the exact number of letters in the word I was looking for. Anyway, feels good to have a total win in today's tiny game and looking forward to seeing who will join me xD https://harvest.meadow.cafe/ #amPla...

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  POETRY ACCEPTANCE FUCK YEAH #LjWrites #AcceptanceLetter

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  #ScribesAndMakers May 21: What medium would you choose to depict a visual image of a lake? A pencil sketch for now, since I'm still learning! 👁👍✏

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  #Backup success story: Retrieved a photo from over 5 years ago from remote backup using #rclone , so old it's not only long gone from my phone but from my local hard drive. The external drive I backed it up to failed to survive a fall of approximately 5 cm (about 2 inches, for USians) and will cost me about as much as the disk itself to recover the files 😒 The remote #BackBlaze / #b2 backup using rclone, however, is chugging along just fine and has not only been backing up the files for...

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  ❝ One item stood out from the rest, a large dark glass bead decorated with pale wavy lines. Similar beads often appear in women’s graves from the 4th and 5th centuries CE as jewelry or burial goods. This bead came from a settlement pit instead of a burial context. Because of this, archaeologists think residents may have reused the object for another purpose, possibly as a spindle whorl. ❞ – Dario Radley, https://archaeologymag.com/2026/05/settlement-with-weaving-workshop-in-germany-gravel-pit/...

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  @TarkabarkaHolgy@ohai.social I discussed this a couple months ago, though at least the text was real and not AI in that case, just inadequately cited in my opinion ("Native American North American" is NOT a proper citation of a Sioux tale!!). https://writeout.ink/@ljwrites/115755078445647803 The same site was also passing off a work of modern fiction/modified retelling as Korean folktale. So many bad practices on folktale sites and collections even before AI enters the picture... :blob...

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  They're singing a sutra down by the thoroughfare, I'm guessing ahead of Buddha's birthday in Korea. It's very calming in the deepening dusk 🙏 #Buddhism

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  Started from behind in today's #HarvestGame (unusual for me, usually I'm the first in because of time zones) and currently at the top of the board ✌️ I'm at 75% but the goal is to get closer to 80% in between work. https://harvest.meadow.cafe/ #WordGame #amPlaying

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  [T]he modern conflation of elections with #democracy contributes not only to #plutocracy but also to the drift toward authoritarianism. The danger lies not simply in the plutocratic proclivities of electoral processes or the occasional production of dangerous leaders,but in the way that their misidentification as the embodiment of popular sovereignty enables potential demagogues—often themselves plutocrats—to claim that they uniquely represent the authentic “will of the people.” This grants them...

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  Highly recommending this no-strings-attached download of @susankayequinn 's A Recipe for Marketing Indie Books. https://dl.bookfunnel.com/mymy5izu1p It's focused on indie publishing of fiction book series and she speaks on the subject with the detail and authority someone who has Done That Shit. It's distinct from a lot of other advice I've seen (sharp divide between KU/wide strategies, recommendation against click-through ads, total lack of reliance on social m...

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  I'm reading a draft of @dilmandila 's THE BLOSSOMING OF THE BIG TREE where an autistic grandma must coordinate the defense of her #solarpunk utopian federation from colonialist invaders, and one thing I find really interesting is the "old person PoV" as a counterpart — with both similarities and contrasts — to "fish out of water" (think Luke Skywalker, Bilbo Baggins, and many many mostly young sword-and-sorcery or isekai/rebirth protagonists) f...

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  #WordWeavers May 10 – What are the beauty standards like in your world and do they impact any of your characters? In the Koreanic communities of 1st century BCE as depicted in my big WIP, fat women are highly sought after. My fat noblewoman MC is a celebrated beauty, making her one of the most eligible maidens (and later widows) in the region. Well, that and her riches and lands, and the chance of being the heir of her father who has no sons — but being famously beautiful doesn't hurt,...

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  @VisualStuart@pdx.social ugh enraging, and I wonder if this is a variation of a Kavanaugh stop (he evidently dislikes that name, which is all the more reason to use it).

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  #WritersCoffeeClub May 8 – What experience can you identify as having made you the writer you are today? As Toni Morrison (rest in power) put it, “If you find a book you really want to read but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” I couldn't find enough #historicalFiction that centered queer, working-class Koreans and nonwhite people the way I wanted, so I decided to write some myself. Same with some of what I'm branching out into, like ripped-from-the-headlines...